As Saturday will see the second anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Chinese strategists, economists and experts on international relations have recently given their reviews of the crisis. They have a series of key findings, including that Russia will not be defeated by Western sanctions and weapons, and the Russian economy could re-rise in the future; the war is likely to be a long-term conflict; and the West is losing faith and the US might abandon Ukraine if Donald Trump gets elected later this year.
Although China is not directly involved in the Ukraine crisis, Chinese elites and the public have been paying close attention to the situation, as they care about its impact on the Chinese economy and China’s ties with Russia and the West. China has always tried to contribute to the mediation of the crisis and eyed a post-war reconstruction for the two countries, analysts said. They noted that all of these have driven Chinese scholars to make efforts to find valuable information from the conflict and use it to guide China’s policymaking.
Profound changes
The Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at the Renmin University of China (RDCY) held a senimar on Wednesday to release three major reports about the institute’s researches in the past two years about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the findings about future development of China-Russia relations, as well as Russia’s domestic market after Western companies pulled out from the country in 2022.
[…]
“The most important conclusion that we have drawn in the report is that the Russia-Ukraine conflict will become a long-term fight,” Wang said, citing the newly-released report.
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I’m not sure why anyone thought the US’s sanctions were going to matter? Isn’t Russia’s economy massively backed by trades with countries like Mexico, Brazil, and China?
The West is also helping because it’s still buying Russian oil and gas, it’s just coming via a more circuitous route so its origin can be hidden. Oil laundering, basically. It’s just more expensive now because it’s travelling further and there are more middlemen involved. Hilarious really.
From the Wall Street Journal (April 2022) The West Is Still Buying Russian Oil, but It’s Now Harder to Track
If there’s anyone who can launder your oil, it’s the west lol
This article is from 2 years ago
Correct. I drew attention to the publication year when I posted it - to make the point that people have known for a very long time yet have still not done anything about it… not that they really can (or indeed want to, especially in Europe, and especially in Germany where the economy has been historically very reliant on cheap oil and gas from Russia).
It is also heavily tied to trade with Western Europe in most unusual ways. I.e. turns out, we’re buying turkey eggs from Poland, because for some reason, eggs from locally grown turkeys aren’t used to expand turkey herds. Another example is metal cutters for industrial manufacturers - turns out we’ve been buying them from Israel of all places.
Another matter to consider is the scope of yankee sanctions - they don’t just sanction a country, they threaten everyone else to stop trading with it.
I’m pretty sure a group of turkeys isn’t called a herd, that’s for horses and whatnot. For birds it’s usually called a flock but then again it might not apply to turkeys cause English is weird and there’s like a hundred of these stupid words for groups of animals and hardly anybody actually uses most of them.
Historically they did. Historically just the threat of them sent most countries and companies scurrying to comply out of fear of being hit. The US expected them to work. The EU expected them to work. Even many in Russia have been shocked at how resilient their economy has been to it as have many in the global south. This was a damn-breaking moment, the moment everyone in the global south realized you could challenge and resist the US and win and it is why we have this sea-change moment happening.
Edit I came off as excessively harsh, sorry. Let’s act like the US sanctions are historically weak and do nothing instead of killing people, bringing down countries and companies, etc. This was not something anyone expected.
I wasn’t acting like the sanctions are historically weak? It was an actual question
My apologies. I shouldn’t have replied in that way.
it’s all good, I probably could have worded my original comment better anyway.
It wasn’t this obvious in 2022. China stance was as usual misunderstood by USA, China was quiet about that, but it was in the best interest of China to help Russia (as we tankies see so clearly it’s not even worth mentioning), but USA seemed to be really surprised and outraged when China not only didn’t joined the sanctions but also started to expand trade with Russia in speed rarily precedented in history before. Same with India, USA seemed to take their participation in sanctions for granted but didn’t managed to see Modi government as highly opportunistic, oriented on their own interest, and having stronger contact with reality than the US govt. After those two supported Russia, and USA shown signs of weakness, other global south countries started to take more decided stance opposing USA since now they have something concrete to lean on and don’t risk being destroyed like Iraq or Libya.
But it could work, and regardless of real chance USA seemed to take it for granted that it would